OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An investigation of the Online Payment and Banking System Apps in Bangladesh
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Presently, Bangladesh is expending substantial efforts to digitize its national infrastructure, with a significant emphasis on achieving this goal through mobile applications that facilitate online payments and banking system advancements. Despite the lack of knowledge about the security level of these systems, they are currently in frequent use without much consideration. To observe whether they follow the minimum global set standards, we choose to conduct static and dynamic analysis of the applications using available open-source analyzers and open-source tools. This allows us to attempt to extract sensitive information, if possible, and determine whether the applications adhere to the standards of MASVS set by OWASP. We show how we analyzed 17 .apks and a SDK using open source scanner and discover security flaws to the applications, such as weaknesses related to data storage, vulnerable cryptographic elements, insecure network communications, and unsafe utilization of WebViews, detected by the scanner. These outputs demonstrate the need for extensive manual analysis of the application through source code review and dynamic analysis. We further implement reverse engineering and dynamic approach to verify the outputs and expose some applications do not comply with the standard method of network communication. Moreover, we attempt to verify the rest of the potential vulnerabilities in the next phase of our ongoing investigation.
Finite Blocklength Performance of Capacity-achieving Codes in the Light of Complexity Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Since the work of Polyanskiy, Poor and Verdú on the finite blocklength performance of capacity-achieving codes for discrete memoryless channels, many papers have attempted to find further results for more practically relevant channels. However, it seems that the complexity of computing capacity-achieving codes has not been investigated until now. We study this question for the simplest non-trivial Gaussian channels, i.e., the additive colored Gaussian noise channel. To assess the computational complexity, we consider the classes $\mathrm{FP}_1$ and $\#\mathrm{P}_1$. $\mathrm{FP}_1$ includes functions computable by a deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time, whereas $\#\mathrm{P}_1$ encompasses functions that count the number of solutions verifiable in polynomial time. It is widely assumed that $\mathrm{FP}_1\neq\#\mathrm{P}_1$. It is of interest to determine the conditions under which, for a given $M \in \mathbb{N}$, where $M$ describes the precision of the deviation of $C(P,N)$, for a certain blocklength $n_M$ and a decoding error $ε> 0$ with $ε\in\mathbb{Q}$, the following holds: $R_{n_M}(ε)>C(P,N)-\frac{1}{2^M}$. It is shown that there is a polynomial-time computable $N_*$ such that for sufficiently large $P_*\in\mathbb{Q}$, the sequences $\{R_{n_M}(ε)\}_{{n_M}\in\mathbb{N}}$, where each $R_{n_M}(ε)$ satisfies the previous condition, cannot be computed in polynomial time if $\mathrm{FP}_1\neq\#\mathrm{P}_1$. Hence, the complexity of computing the sequence $\{R_{n_M}(ε)\}_{n_M\in\mathbb{N}}$ grows faster than any polynomial as $M$ increases. Consequently, it is shown that either the sequence of achievable rates $\{R_{n_M}(ε)\}_{n_M\in\mathbb{N}}$ as a function of the blocklength, or the sequence of blocklengths $\{n_M\}_{M\in\mathbb{N}}$ corresponding to the achievable rates, is not a polynomial-time computable sequence.
BiGym: A Demo-Driven Mobile Bi-Manual Manipulation Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce BiGym, a new benchmark and learning environment for mobile bi-manual demo-driven robotic manipulation. BiGym features 40 diverse tasks set in home environments, ranging from simple target reaching to complex kitchen cleaning. To capture the real-world performance accurately, we provide human-collected demonstrations for each task, reflecting the diverse modalities found in real-world robot trajectories. BiGym supports a variety of observations, including proprioceptive data and visual inputs such as RGB, and depth from 3 camera views. To validate the usability of BiGym, we thoroughly benchmark the state-of-the-art imitation learning algorithms and demo-driven reinforcement learning algorithms within the environment and discuss the future opportunities.
The Misclassification Likelihood Matrix: Some Classes Are More Likely To Be Misclassified Than Others
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This study introduces the Misclassification Likelihood Matrix (MLM) as a novel tool for quantifying the reliability of neural network predictions under distribution shifts. The MLM is obtained by leveraging softmax outputs and clustering techniques to measure the distances between the predictions of a trained neural network and class centroids. By analyzing these distances, the MLM provides a comprehensive view of the model's misclassification tendencies, enabling decision-makers to identify the most common and critical sources of errors. The MLM allows for the prioritization of model improvements and the establishment of decision thresholds based on acceptable risk levels. The approach is evaluated on the MNIST dataset using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a perturbed version of the dataset to simulate distribution shifts. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the MLM in assessing the reliability of predictions and highlight its potential in enhancing the interpretability and risk mitigation capabilities of neural networks. The implications of this work extend beyond image classification, with ongoing applications in autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, to improve the safety and reliability of decision-making in complex, real-world environments.
Decompose and Compare Consistency: Measuring VLMs' Answer Reliability via Task-Decomposition Consistency Comparison
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite tremendous advancements, current state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are still far from perfect. They tend to hallucinate and may generate biased responses. In such circumstances, having a way to assess the reliability of a given response generated by a VLM is quite useful. Existing methods, such as estimating uncertainty using answer likelihoods or prompt-based confidence generation, often suffer from overconfidence. Other methods use self-consistency comparison but are affected by confirmation biases. To alleviate these, we propose Decompose and Compare Consistency (DeCC) for reliability measurement. By comparing the consistency between the direct answer generated using the VLM's internal reasoning process, and the indirect answers obtained by decomposing the question into sub-questions and reasoning over the sub-answers produced by the VLM, DeCC measures the reliability of VLM's direct answer. Experiments across six vision-language tasks with three VLMs show DeCC's reliability estimation achieves better correlation with task accuracy compared to the existing methods.
OpenDiLoCo: An Open-Source Framework for Globally Distributed Low-Communication Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

OpenDiLoCo is an open-source implementation and replication of the Distributed Low-Communication (DiLoCo) training method for large language models. We provide a reproducible implementation of the DiLoCo experiments, offering it within a scalable, decentralized training framework using the Hivemind library. We demonstrate its effectiveness by training a model across two continents and three countries, while maintaining 90-95% compute utilization. Additionally, we conduct ablations studies focusing on the algorithm's compute efficiency, scalability in the number of workers and show that its gradients can be all-reduced using FP16 without any performance degradation. Furthermore, we scale OpenDiLoCo to 3x the size of the original work, demonstrating its effectiveness for billion parameter models.
Green Screen Augmentation Enables Scene Generalisation in Robotic Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Generalising vision-based manipulation policies to novel environments remains a challenging area with limited exploration. Current practices involve collecting data in one location, training imitation learning or reinforcement learning policies with this data, and deploying the policy in the same location. However, this approach lacks scalability as it necessitates data collection in multiple locations for each task. This paper proposes a novel approach where data is collected in a location predominantly featuring green screens. We introduce Green-screen Augmentation (GreenAug), employing a chroma key algorithm to overlay background textures onto a green screen. Through extensive real-world empirical studies with over 850 training demonstrations and 8.2k evaluation episodes, we demonstrate that GreenAug surpasses no augmentation, standard computer vision augmentation, and prior generative augmentation methods in performance. While no algorithmic novelties are claimed, our paper advocates for a fundamental shift in data collection practices. We propose that real-world demonstrations in future research should utilise green screens, followed by the application of GreenAug. We believe GreenAug unlocks policy generalisation to visually distinct novel locations, addressing the current scene generalisation limitations in robot learning.
Enhancing HNSW Index for Real-Time Updates: Addressing Unreachable Points and Performance Degradation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) is a fundamental and essential component in data mining and information retrieval, with graph-based methodologies demonstrating superior performance compared to alternative approaches. Extensive research efforts have been dedicated to improving search efficiency by developing various graph-based indices, such as HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World). However, the performance of HNSW and most graph-based indices become unacceptable when faced with a large number of real-time deletions, insertions, and updates. Furthermore, during update operations, HNSW can result in some data points becoming unreachable, a situation we refer to as the `unreachable points phenomenon'. This phenomenon could significantly affect the search accuracy of the graph in certain situations. To address these issues, we present efficient measures to overcome the shortcomings of HNSW, specifically addressing poor performance over long periods of delete and update operations and resolving the issues caused by the unreachable points phenomenon. Our proposed MN-RU algorithm effectively improves update efficiency and suppresses the growth rate of unreachable points, ensuring better overall performance and maintaining the integrity of the graph. Our results demonstrate that our methods outperform existing approaches. Furthermore, since our methods are based on HNSW, they can be easily integrated with existing indices widely used in the industrial field, making them practical for future real-world applications. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/xwt1/MN-RU.git}
Spatial-Temporal Generative AI for Traffic Flow Estimation with Sparse Data of Connected Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Traffic flow estimation (TFE) is crucial for intelligent transportation systems. Traditional TFE methods rely on extensive road sensor networks and typically incur significant costs. Sparse mobile crowdsensing enables a cost-effective alternative by utilizing sparsely distributed probe vehicle data (PVD) provided by connected vehicles. However, as pointed out by the central limit theorem, the sparsification of PVD leads to the degradation of TFE accuracy. In response, this paper introduces a novel and cost-effective TFE framework that leverages sparse PVD and improves accuracy by applying the spatial-temporal generative artificial intelligence (GAI) framework. Within this framework, the conditional encoder mines spatial-temporal correlations in the initial TFE results derived from averaging vehicle speeds of each region, and the generative decoder generates high-quality and accurate TFE outputs. Additionally, the design of the spatial-temporal neural network is discussed, which is the backbone of the conditional encoder for effectively capturing spatial-temporal correlations. The effectiveness of the proposed TFE approach is demonstrated through evaluations based on real-world connected vehicle data. The experimental results affirm the feasibility of our sparse PVD-based TFE framework and highlight the significant role of the spatial-temporal GAI framework in enhancing the accuracy of TFE.
Knowledge Overshadowing Causes Amalgamated Hallucination in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Hallucination is often regarded as a major impediment for using large language models (LLMs), especially for knowledge-intensive tasks. Even when the training corpus consists solely of true statements, language models still generate hallucinations in the form of amalgamations of multiple facts. We coin this phenomenon as ``knowledge overshadowing'': when we query knowledge from a language model with multiple conditions, some conditions overshadow others, leading to hallucinated outputs. This phenomenon partially stems from training data imbalance, which we verify on both pretrained models and fine-tuned models, over a wide range of LM model families and sizes.From a theoretical point of view, knowledge overshadowing can be interpreted as over-generalization of the dominant conditions (patterns). We show that the hallucination rate grows with both the imbalance ratio (between the popular and unpopular condition) and the length of dominant condition description, consistent with our derived generalization bound. Finally, we propose to utilize overshadowing conditions as a signal to catch hallucination before it is produced, along with a training-free self-contrastive decoding method to alleviate hallucination during inference. Our proposed approach showcases up to 82% F1 for hallucination anticipation and 11.2% to 39.4% hallucination control, with different models and datasets.
RoLoRA: Fine-tuning Rotated Outlier-free LLMs for Effective Weight-Activation Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), as a representative Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT)method, significantly enhances the training efficiency by updating only a small portion of the weights in Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, weight-only quantization techniques have also been applied to LoRA methods to reduce the memory footprint of fine-tuning. However, applying weight-activation quantization to the LoRA pipeline is under-explored, and we observe substantial performance degradation primarily due to the presence of activation outliers. In this work, we propose RoLoRA, the first LoRA-based scheme for effective weight-activation quantization. RoLoRA utilizes rotation for outlier elimination and proposes rotation-aware fine-tuning to preserve the outlier-free characteristics in rotated LLMs. Experimental results show RoLoRA consistently improves low-bit LoRA convergence and post-training quantization robustness in weight-activation settings. We evaluate RoLoRA across LLaMA2-7B/13B, LLaMA3-8B models, achieving up to 29.5% absolute accuracy gain of 4-bit weight-activation quantized LLaMA2- 13B on commonsense reasoning tasks compared to LoRA baseline. We further demonstrate its effectiveness on Large Multimodal Models (LLaVA-1.5-7B). Codes are available at https://github.com/HuangOwen/RoLoRA
Imitation Learning with Additional Constraints on Motion Style using Parametric Bias
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Imitation learning is one of the methods for reproducing human demonstration adaptively in robots. So far, it has been found that generalization ability of the imitation learning enables the robots to perform tasks adaptably in untrained environments. However, motion styles such as motion trajectory and the amount of force applied depend largely on the dataset of human demonstration, and settle down to an average motion style. In this study, we propose a method that adds parametric bias to the conventional imitation learning network and can add constraints to the motion style. By experiments using PR2 and the musculoskeletal humanoid MusashiLarm, we show that it is possible to perform tasks by changing its motion style as intended with constraints on joint velocity, muscle length velocity, and muscle tension.
TinyGraph: Joint Feature and Node Condensation for Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Training graph neural networks (GNNs) on large-scale graphs can be challenging due to the high computational expense caused by the massive number of nodes and high-dimensional nodal features. Existing graph condensation studies tackle this problem only by reducing the number of nodes in the graph. However, the resulting condensed graph data can still be cumbersome. Specifically, although the nodes of the Citeseer dataset are reduced to 0.9% (30 nodes) in training, the number of features is 3,703, severely exceeding the training sample magnitude. Faced with this challenge, we study the problem of joint condensation for both features and nodes in large-scale graphs. This task is challenging mainly due to 1) the intertwined nature of the node features and the graph structure calls for the feature condensation solver to be structure-aware; and 2) the difficulty of keeping useful information in the condensed graph. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework TinyGraph, to condense features and nodes simultaneously in graphs. Specifically, we cast the problem as matching the gradients of GNN weights trained on the condensed graph and the gradients obtained from training over the original graph, where the feature condensation is achieved by a trainable function. The condensed graph obtained by minimizing the matching loss along the training trajectory can henceforth retain critical information in the original graph. Extensive experiments were carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TinyGraph. For example, a GNN trained with TinyGraph retains 98.5% and 97.5% of the original test accuracy on the Cora and Citeseer datasets, respectively, while significantly reducing the number of nodes by 97.4% and 98.2%, and the number of features by 90.0% on both datasets.
Mover Logic: A Concurrent Program Logic for Reduction and Rely-Guarantee Reasoning (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Rely-guarantee (RG) logic uses thread interference specifications (relies and guarantees) to reason about the correctness of multithreaded software. Unfortunately, RG logic requires each function postcondition to be "stabilized" or specialized to the behavior of other threads, making it difficult to write function specifications that are reusable at multiple call sites. This paper presents mover logic, which extends RG logic to address this problem via the notion of atomic functions. Atomic functions behave as if they execute serially without interference from concurrent threads, and so they can be assigned more general and reusable specifications that avoid the stabilization requirement of RG logic. Several practical verifiers (Calvin-R, QED, CIVL, Armada, Anchor, etc.) have demonstrated the modularity benefits of atomic function specifications. However, the complexity of these systems and their correctness proofs makes it challenging to understand and extend these systems. Mover logic formalizes the central ideas of reduction in a declarative program logic that provides a foundation for future work in this area.
Maritime Tracking Data Analysis and Integration with AISdb
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Efficiently handling Automatic Identification System (AIS) data is vital for enhancing maritime safety and navigation, yet is hindered by the system's high volume and error-prone datasets. This paper introduces the Automatic Identification System Database (AISdb), a novel tool designed to address the challenges of processing and analyzing AIS data. AISdb is a comprehensive, open-source platform that enables the integration of AIS data with environmental datasets, thus enriching analyses of vessel movements and their environmental impacts. By facilitating AIS data collection, cleaning, and spatio-temporal querying, AISdb significantly advances AIS data research. Utilizing AIS data from various sources, AISdb demonstrates improved handling and analysis of vessel information, contributing to enhancing maritime safety, security, and environmental sustainability efforts.
Dynamics of Gender Bias within Computer Science
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

A new dataset (N = 7,456) analyzes women's research authorship in the Association for Computing Machinery's founding 13 Special Interest Groups or SIGs, a proxy for computer science. ACM SIGs expanded during 1970-2000; each experienced increasing women's authorship. But diversity abounds. Several SIGs had fewer than 10% women authors while SIGUCCS (university computing centers) exceeded 40%. Three SIGs experienced accelerating growth in women's authorship; most, including a composite ACM, had decelerating growth. This research may encourage reform efforts, often focusing on general education or workforce factors (across the entity of "computer science"), to examine under-studied dynamics within computer science that shaped changes in women's participation.
Automata-based constraints for language model decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Language models (LMs) are often expected to generate strings in some formal language; for example, structured data, API calls, or code snippets. Although LMs can be tuned to improve their adherence to formal syntax, this does not guarantee conformance, especially with smaller LMs suitable for large-scale deployment. In addition, tuning requires significant resources, making it impractical for uncommon or task-specific formats. To prevent downstream parsing errors we would ideally constrain the LM to only produce valid output, but this is severely complicated by tokenization, which is typically both ambiguous and misaligned with the formal grammar. We solve these issues through the application of automata theory, deriving an efficient closed-form solution for the regular languages, a broad class of formal languages with many practical applications, including API calls or schema-guided JSON and YAML. We also discuss pragmatic extensions for coping with the issue of high branching factor, and extend our techniques to deterministic context-free languages, which similarly admit an efficient closed-form solution. Previous work on this topic (Willard and Louf, 2023) layers bespoke solutions onto automata, leading to problems with speed, correctness, and extensibility. Instead, we reformulate the entire task in terms of automata so we can leverage well-studied and well-optimized algorithms. Our system compiles constraints ~7,000x faster, is provably correct, and can be extended in a modular fashion.
Real-Time Summarization of Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we describe our approaches to TREC Real-Time Summarization of Twitter. We focus on real time push notification scenario, which requires a system monitors the stream of sampled tweets and returns the tweets relevant and novel to given interest profiles. Dirichlet score with and with very little smoothing (baseline) are employed to classify whether a tweet is relevant to a given interest profile. Using metrics including Mean Average Precision (MAP, cumulative gain (CG) and discount cumulative gain (DCG), the experiment indicates that our approach has a good performance. It is also desired to remove the redundant tweets from the pushing queue. Due to the precision limit, we only describe the algorithm in this paper.